Standby/low power device usage.

WalletMoth

Something I am just curious about. I just had a smart meter installed, and looking at the monitor I see that I'd used nearly 0.3kwh within the first 3 hours, with only the fridge, freezer, and router turned on; I also had my laptop on charge for an hour, and of course there is a mains powered smoke detector. Is it normal to use 100w an hour with just cold and standby devices on?

Many thanks.

Rodders53

Fridges and freezers are a big consumer of electrickery.  100 W for each might not be unreasonable estimates, but not on 100% of the time of course.  Check out the spec sheets: most (all?) makers supply such information.

Your router-modem will have a number on it's spec sheet, as will other things.

Your 100W = 876 kWh per annum.  What is your normal annual consumption?

My mains smoke alarms have a standby 0.25 Watts consumption so 1 Watt for the four installed: or nearly 9 kWh per year.   Your brand / model may well be different!

Gerry1

Yes, the fridge and the freezer will easily account for 100W or more (BTW, it's 100W not 100W per hour).  You'll also find that there are a surprising number of items that also have some standby consumption, e.g. the microwave with its clock display, the illuminated bellpush, the cordless phone, the central heating programmer, the central heating pump, the PIR floodlight, the clock radio...

Talldave

Reading the live consumption display will be more informative.  Your 100W is an average.  You might find it's 40-50W without the fridge or freezer running their  compressors but 150-250W when one or both of them are running. Older computer kit in standby can be hungry compared to new TVs that are 1W or lower. Those old branded beer fridges were horrifying too! Do some detective work, it's quite revealing.

matelodave

Sometime more info is worse than non if you dont understand what it means. Watching a meter is bound to give you heart palpitations.Use it as a tool to understand your consumption and work out how to reduce it, rather than just seeing a number and getting concerned about it

Instantaneous or even short term readings are useless for really working out what you are using - just watching it go up and down when the kettle is on or off doesn't give you the whole picture. You would be much better off taking a meter reading (from the meter itself unless the IHD is accurately relaying meter readings) just before you go to bed and when you get up, before turning anything on. That will give you a much better idea of what your baseline consumption is - just make sure that stuff that's not in use is turned off before you go to bed.

As said above, fridges and freezers do use a lot more than you think that they might, especially if they are getting on a bit, dont forget stuff like Sky boxed and DVD players on standby, routers, playstations, computers on standby (my laptop uses around 20watts when idle and about 60 when charging), - even our cooker uses more than you think it should (the induction hob has a standby setting as well as a clock). so gets shut off at the wall. The microwave oven has a clock, even our reclining chairs chew their way through 10watts each on standby. If any charger or stuff get warm then they are using power, so turn them off.

A gas boiler has a pump, fan, motorised valves and control circuits all of which use some energy - not a lot but it all starts to add up. Dont forget to look at how much your lighting is using especially if you've got halogens in the kitchen or somewhere else - LEDs can reduce your consumption by nearly 90%.

RelievedSheff

We were away for a couple of weeks at the beginning of this month and our standby useage for electric was 2kWh per day or about 83 watts. So our standby power is 730kWh per year or a quarter of our annual useage!

Petriix

We've got two routers which each draw 20/30W and an amplifier which powers a bunch of ceiling speakers that seems to draw a constant 20W. The fridge-freezer runs at about 100W when the pump is running which is about half the time, as well as some built in heaters which defrost it and prevent condensation etc. which turn on periodically. There's 3 ~ 2W led bulbs which we leave on constantly and I believe the doorbell light uses around 4W.

Our average background consumption is around 190W total so around 4.5kWh per day. Thankfully the solar panels account for around half of this annually and our total imports are under 2000kWh.

I did have one router and the amp connected to a smart plug which was set to turn them off overnight, but it was really annoying because it kept interrupting my late-night TV watching. I sometimes remember to turn the amp off, but it's in a cupboard and then I get annoyed when the music doesn't work.

One final point to note is that, for maybe 5 months of the year, each consumed kWh inside the house produces that much useful heat which obviously reduces the heating demand, although gas heating is ~ 1/4 of the price (after boiler losses).